some context – I’ve been learning for a while now so I pretty much know like 95%+ of everything I read and watch, and even the stuff that’s “new” I almost always am able to understand from context or kanji (I look the new stuff up maybe half the time i guess? mainly if I see a kanji I’m not sure how to read). My main question is aimed to people who have been learning for a while- speaking from your own experience, should I actually add these words to anki or will I just absorb them over time? My doubt about this is because a lot of these words are not very common so I’m not sure how “absorbable” they are.
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For me, I personally look at a text and add every word to don’t know to anki. So you should try it you want to
Once you reach the point where you hardly find anything new, “hunting” for it will make it easy to absorb. However, that is active. You actually do add them to your decks or into some app or just note them – the how is not important, just that you consciously put effort into remembering it.
I’m in the same boat. On the one hand, adding everything definitely speeds up the learning, but on the other hand I’m getting tired of Anki and want to decrease the number of reviews as much as possible.
That’s why I’ve decided on a compromise: if I effortlessly understood a new word, then I don’t add it, but if I had to think at least for a second, then I always add it. Additionally, I sometimes delete previously added cards if I remember them well.
For me, when I reached that point I could almost feel which words were going to be easy to remember and which ones weren’t. Also I just add any word with a kanji I haven’t seen before.
Yes, you will learn it over time naturally. But it’s going to be rather slow comparing to active/intentional learning. In numbers it’s something like this. Let’s say that you know 15k words, while educated natives know ~30k words. If you learn 30 words/day intentionally, then it’s going to be 16-17 months. If you learn passively, most likely it’s going to be ~5-15 years, and you still might have small gaps.
Usually people learn passively, because things like SRS are boring and there is no need to push it. Outside of SRS, you can follow such idea. If you see ~100 unknown words everyday, you don’t really need to change much. If it’s lower, and you want to learn fast, then you can either pick something new, from completely different genre/area, or focus a bit of attention on each word. The problem with a nearly native stage is that people understand words from context, and it means that usually people sweep through it without paying any attention. You won’t remember how such word is pronounced even after several sentences, and most likely you won’t check it’s definition to see exact meaning, because general meaning is understandable anyway. Such low attention approach works fine when we have a huge amount of unknown words, it might be even the only fitting method of learning, because when we have thousands of unknown words everyday, we physically can’t memorize it all. But when you have only several tens of unknown words, it’s just not very effective. This is why we either need variety to see many new words, or pay more attention to every new word to keep our learning tempo. And these variety and attention factors will determine if you need 15 months or 15 years to learn rare words.